For this Tiki Express Tutorial I’ll be using a Tiki19 and not as I usually do a Tiki18LTS.
Some Tiki Express Tutorial fans asked what is an LTS version. LTS stands for Long Term Services and it gives you the assurance of using a well tested version that will be taken care of for a duration of 5 years.
For exemple Tiki18, that was released in January 2018 will be supported till January 2023.
This is important for environment that prioritise stability versus cutting edge but less stable version. If you want to know more and understand better the Tiki release version cycle please check: https://tiki.org/Versions. So while Tiki19 has released 3 month ago and is not an LTS, they were no real changes on the Banners feature since several versions and everything explained here should be valid from Tiki12 to the most recent version of your Tiki.

How to enable the feature from the Control Panels

There are several ways to place a banner in a Tiki depending of what you need and the level of control that is required.
In some case a plain HTML or Javascript code from an advertising company inside a single or several pages will be good enough.
Sometimes you’d like to control better a single elements displayed depending certains condition in a Tiki module over several pages.
And in some case you really want to control or monitor the numbers of click, the life duration, the date and other parameters you want allow for a banner to be displayed.

The Tiki Banners feature is highly configurable and aimed for the most extreme cases. Note that the banners feature can be deviated from its original purpose and can be used for many thing that are not banners, like specific timed messages to your community, user events announcement, or control clicks on an element, etc.

I’m sure some of you will have terrific ideas, please let us know in the comments and share the ideas but for now let’s roll.

First thing first we need to enable the Banners feature in the Control Panels. The banners feature is an "Advanced feature so I switch the preferences filter from basic to advanced and I save as my default preferences. If you don’t understand that part, just check my tutorial about Administration Tips in Tiki.

A good value to start or for better configure your Tiki.
In the Features panel I scroll down to the Administrative Features and I activate the "Banners" features. Not a big deal but if you don’t feel comfortable with activating a Tiki features, I also did a tutorial for that. Go on my channel or my website at bsfez.com and grab what you need.

Let’s also activate the banner plugin so it will be one of a possible option to place the banner on page. I go in the Editing and Plugins panel, do a search for the word "banner" using my browser search tool. Enable the banner plugin and apply to save the change.

Now that the configuration is in place I would like to use a real working website instead of the default install out of the box. I’ve quickly prepared one for this video using bootstrap4 and created already a new menu and a couple of pages. Let me update the header, move down the admin menu and put in place the user menu. Then I’ll switch the theme and also adapt change the layout.

I’m doing that without really explaining as this pretty basic, but if you want me to do a tutorial covering those, just add a comment in the video on my youtube channel and I’ll do a basic of how to logo, menu, layout how to Tiki Express Tutorial.

Now we have our nice looking website on and we have our feature activated, let’s go to the "Setting" menu. We can see now a new item menu, "Banners" that lead to an empty list of banners. Let’s populate it by creating our first tiki banner.
I click on the create banner button.

And wow look at that ! So many thing parameters and control to give you extra flexibility unlike in many other webApp. With Tiki you can really control everything for your banner. I’ll explain in a minute but right now let’s place our first banner.

Set a banner using the plugin banner in a page

As this website is about house renting, let pretend that I have a friend that start a painting business and I want to help him with it. He sent me a jpg banner and I don’t need to monitor or control anything. Just something that will be displayed and available as long as I don’t remove it.

In the url field I put a link for the banner… Let’s use my own website for the show.
I don’t change anything about limitations… However I have to create a banner zone.
A zone is a marker to tell Tiki what banner goes where. We need at least one and you usually use this to group your banners by size, orientation or language. You are not limited and you can use those area the way you want.
I create my zone A and assign it for this banner.
Again I don’t change anything about duration, time or days.
I click at the radio button "Use image" method.
Browse for my image and click save the banner.
Back to the list it is here.

Now I need to set the function that will display the banners within my zone A on page.
Now you remember that a minute ago we activated the banner plugin. So you know that it exist and will be available from your toolbar when editing a page, but you can also use this smarty function directly. You’ll have less control over the banner but it will do the job perfectly for this case. I’ll copy the plugin code.

I go back to my Home where I have a space to display a banner.
I edit the page.
Paste the smarty function for the banner and set the zone to A as my banner was assigned to that zone.
Save and I have my friend banner displayed !

Let’s click on it, go back and refresh.

View the banners stats

Back to the banners page on the banner list I can see already important information and on the action menu, on the right under the wrench I have a "stats" item where I can find more details regarding the usage or the options I set for the banner. If I set my banner to a specific user, he will also have access to that information.

Now that we know how to set a basic banner on our Tiki, let’s go back to the "Create a banner" page so we can review the important parameters.

Review the banners parameters

The URL to link the banner, we know what it does.

The Client, a user assigned for this banner. Beside letting you manage your customer using a tracker or requesting money using paypal through Tiki, it will grant the user an access to the stats for all his assigned banners. That’s pretty important if you want to mognetize or do some kind of business or trade using the banners feature of Tiki.

The Maximum impressions for it after what it won’t be displayed. no need to explain.

The Maximum number of impressions for a (single) user after what the banner won’t be displayed for him. Using this setting you can limit the number of time one of your user will seen this banner.

The Maximum clicks on a banner before it stop to be displayed. Again no need to explain.

Zone, where you can assign your banner to. We know already what this is.

Time control to display a banner, only between these dates, only during these hours or days. Pretty straightforward.

And finally the banner methods:
HTML (gives the more freedom and you can use almost anything here)
Image as we just tested is the easy one
Flash that’s a legacy method, I guess it will be removed at some point.
Text that is very useful for internal message to your Community users or Intranet company’s users.

Really much more than the usual Banners third party plugin you can find on other CMS and Wiki application.

Set a banner using the modules

I won’t do here complete explanation about modules. But very quickly, Tiki is divided in area per layout (top, topbar, toppage, left, right, bottompage, bottom) and using a module you can decide on what section, perspective, structure, page or group of pages and for which language it will be displayed or not displayed. It is very powerful !

Very very quickly, I grab some code from an advertising company. I go to my Tiki settings menu
Click on modules. There I go to custom modules an I create a new module. I give it a name, I paste the code I copied previsouly.
Now I need to add this module in my Tiki. I select the mybanner module I just created and set some basic module options. Position and parameters like nobox=y&section=wiki page&language=en

I exit the modules. Back to my home page, I have my banner in place and it is on all my English Wiki pages.
So that’s another way to display a banner with more controls over where to display it automatically and only if it matches certain condition.

That’s it for today and I hope you’ve enjoyed this Tiki Express Tutorial.
Good feedback and comments are continuing to come in and that’s just great and very helpful.

Having solve most of the technical for my Video Tutorials I will publish more often and get into the expected tutorials about installing Tiki, setting a https://wikisuite.org|WikiSuite] server, using trackers, using the customSearch, using the Maps features and will go into advanced usage for those too.

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